Portfolio: Decade of Fire

Vivian Vazquez

Decade of Fire began to take shape for me several years ago, when a friend, Julia Allen, mentioned to me that nearly eighty percent of the housing in the South Bronx burned down in the 1970s.  I was stunned by this figure, but only began to comprehend its meaning after I was introduced to people who had lived through this disaster.

One of these people, Vivian Vazquez, grew up in the South Bronx during the ‘70s. She shared stories with me about the vibrant community that existed before the fires. But by the time she was 18, her neighborhood was nearly destroyed. To her, the legacy of the fires was not just buildings lost and neighbors disappearing, but more a residual feeling of abandonment, a sense that the city purposefully turned its back as the community was destroyed.

Over the next several years the three of us became co-producers. We read up, and talked to current and former residents, defining the outlines of a story about the South Bronx that had yet to be told.  Our research turned up a history of migration, de-industrialization and racially biased development policies that shaped U.S. cities throughout the 20th century.

Although they arrived only after decades of segregation, redlining and urban renewal, the fires were immediately blamed on the pathologies of ghetto residents. In 1970, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Nixon’s advisor on urban affairs, popularized this claim and suggested that government adopt an attitude of “benign neglect” towards unruly communities of color. During the next decade, as the fires raged on, New York cut fire service in the Bronx down to the bone.

By 1976 much of the South Bronx had burned away. City leaders like Housing Commissioner Roger Starr were proposing that the city perform “triage” and level what was left, including dislocating the 100,000 Bronxites who remained. Starr called this “planned shrinkage,” a term that is today being touted as the solution to urban malaise in places like Detroit. This technical-sounding term masks a brutal policy of abandonment, and ignores how historical forces have created poor neighborhoods of color that are now considered be extraneous and expendable.

I’ve heard that New York has a fiscal crisis every 30 years. If so, today we are right on schedule. While the Bronx has been spared the worst of Bloomberg’s proposed 2011 cuts to fire service, some of the poorest parts of Brooklyn will see their fire protection on the chopping block in the next year.

Today the South Bronx has come back, rebuilt on residents’ love, desperation and sweat equity that finally convinced government to rebuild housing there. Alongside the history of the fires, there are stories of the places and cultures — hip hop, for one — that sustained lives and even allowed them to flourish. But the South Bronx is still one of the poorest areas of the country. As Vivian says in the film, “The people who survive these policies of neglect, we survive. People survive, people cope. But at the same time, it came at a huge cost.”

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The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

All images courtesy of Gretchen Hildebran.